IN ENGLISHYesterday me, my husband and my sister went to the most southern point of Finland, Hanko, for a day trip. It was spring already there, all the snow was gone unlike in my garden, and it felt like spring though it was a cloudy day.In the rocks by the sea I noticed some not so common lichens and if I'm not mistaken, these are rock tribe lichens (Lasallia pustulata or related to it). They are very interesting to me from historical point of view as they have been used to dye red-violet at least since the iron age, or even longer! They were exported from Scandinavia to Britannia in very large amounts. Today it is forbidden to collect lichens from other than your own land, unlike herbaceous plants and berries which you can collect anywhere here.As a modern dyer I don't use them and I don't recommend using them. Firstly they reproduce slowly, and these are not common lichens. Secondly the colour they give does not have the light fastness required for modern use to yarns which are sold, it fades quickly (though lichen dyer specialist Karen Casselman says in her book that the fastness could be improved by dye technique). It is easier and more sustainable to get the same kind of colours from cochineal, and combinations of cochineal with indigo. Anyway, it was very interesting to find them and see how they look in their natural habitat. Here are some pictures of the places they grow in nature by the sea. We had a great day.

Here are me and my husband looking at some sea birds, my sister was a paparazzi:)

IN ENGLISH Several years ago a friend gave me some dried polypores to try for dyeing, these were Leptoporus mollis and Pycnoporus cinnabarinus . I also had some dried cinnamon bracket, Hapalopilus rutilans.All these three polypores are rather small, about size or my thumb or little bigger and all of them are annual, which means that their fruiting bodies appear in autumn and die during the winter. Pycnoporus cinnabarinus, on the left in the picture above, is biggest of these, and it is easiest to notice in the forest because of it's colour. It is common here growing on decaying deciduous trees like rowans or birches.Leptoporus mollis, in the middle, is brighter colored when it is fresh, these are dried fungi. It grows on fallen coniferous trees, like spruce or pines.Cinnamon bracket fungi, on the right, is also common in Finland (but unfortunately not so common in my region where the autumn is many times too dry) growing on deciduous trees, but as it is so small and the colour is the same as is in fallen autumn leaves, it is difficult to find. I dyed the same way with L.mollis and P.cinnabarinus: I crushed the polypores as small as I could, soaked overnight and then boiled for 2-3 hours in alkaline water (I added washing soda to bring pH to 10-11). After boiling I lowered the pH to neutral. I had only 20 grams of P.cinnabarinus and 40grams of L.mollis, but I dyed 20 grams of mordanted wool in both baths. Later I thought that I had too much yarn in P.cinnabarinus bath!Both these polypores dyed mordanted yarn pale yellow (but I don't know if I had had better ratio of wool to fungi with P.cinnabarinus I might have gotten darker yellow), and unmordanted wool even a bit lighter. Swedish Hjördis Lundmark recommends 60grams of dry fungi to 100grams of wool.

IN ENGLISHI had 40grams of dried Hapalopilus rutilans. I crushed them to as small as I could and soaked overnight. When I started to boil them I added ammonia to them so that the pH was about 11 (I didn't aim there, it just happened, most likely little less would have been better). With this polypore I used ammonia rather than washing soda, because the dyes in this polypore are similar to the ones in tooth fungi, and in my experience ammonia works better with them than washing soda.I boiled the fungi for two hours, then strained the bath and added some more water, the pH was now about 8-9. I dyed 40 grams of alum- cream of tartar - mordanted wool in this bath for one hour in 60-70°C. The colour became paler than I expected so I boiled the used fungi again and dyed the same yarn again, but the colour didn't become much deeper. It is no 1.I discussed then with Jenny Dean, because she had gotten better colours in neutral bath, so next I lowered the pH of the bath to 6 with vinegar. I dyed 50 grams of white wool mordanted with only alum in this bath, and got darker colour (no3) than from the first alkaline bath. No 2 is unmordanted yarn from this acid bath.No 4 is second afterbath, also 50grams of alum mordanted wool dyed in acid bath. I didn't get as purple as I had hoped but they are still much better colours than the yellows from other polypores, and cinnamon bracket also dyed much more wool with a small amount of fungi:) In Hjördis Lundmark's book she had dyed with pH 8-9, and gotten best colours in 9, but this didn't happen now. I don't like to dye in hight pH in hot bath, because my yarn suffers then, so this method was better for me. The extraction though is best done in higher pH. I wish I had time to learn to cultivate this polypore!

IN ENGLISHIn February I had dyed with birch bark and I had then left two baths in buckets in cool storage. I had put some already hot dyed yarns with birch bark in the buckets so that I would see it the color would become deeper with more time. Now after three weeks I took the yarns away, and even though the baths were still dark red, the colour of the yarns were in fact even little less deep than originally! The baths were acid, pH 6. It may be that white alum mordanted yarns would have become pink also in cool bath in longer time, but the hot dyed pinks would not benefit at all the cool bath.While I was puttering with the buckets, I accidentally spilled birch bark dye bath on some papers (luckily not important ones). They dyed immediately nice pink so it seems that birch bark could be used also to dye paper pink:) The paper is now almost prettier pink than my yarns.

IN ENGLISHI overdyed with madder some of the yarns I had already dyed with birch bark.I used half the amount of madder to the weight of the yarn (50g of madder to 100g of yarn). I soaked madder overnight, and then heated the bath to hand temperature, after that added wetted yarns to the bath. I kept the dyeing temperature in 55-60°C (130-140°C) and the dyeing time was 3 hours. I get better reds from madder when the temperature is no higher than that. With lower dye temperature is is good to dye for a longer time.In the picture the top yarn is no 2 from the previous posting, it was mordanted with alum and cream of tartar and then dyed with birch bark to pink. The middle yarn had no mordant and was dyed with birch bark (no1 in previous posting), and the bottom yarn was white with no mordant (and no birch bark). All yarns were in the same madder bath.You can see well in the picture the advantage of alum mordant: the red attaches better to the yarn. Birch bark as base color added depth to the yarn.I have these yarns also in my shop now.

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WHY USE NATURAL DYES

"We can keep the knowledge of their use alive, as well as regaining for ourselves a vital contact with the natural world. The ability to correctly identify the plants needed, to understand their growth stages sufficiently well to be able to obtain the greatest dye, offer both challenge and pleasure."

We sell our yarns, mitten kits, knitted things and my husband's photographs at the market Kauppatori in Helsinki. From mid September until mid May my husband will be at the market only on Saturdays if the weather is good. Occasionally also some other days. This week we will be at the market on Monday September 25th, Wednesday September 27th and Saturday September 30th.